Information technology (IT) managers in small and large enterprises make many decisions about data centers and other hardware and software infrastructure components they maintain. For example, backing up data is an important component of a disaster recovery plan. Having a sufficient number of backup servers to periodically backup this data quickly, so as not to interrupt normal enterprise operations, is, therefore, important. However, budgetary, space, air conditioning and other constraints may limit the number of backup servers that a data center may house. Consequently, an IT manager needs to carefully consider current and anticipated backup loads when determining the number of backup servers to maintain. IT managers make many similar decisions regarding data storage servers, e-mail servers, network components, user workstations, software upgrades and the like.
Unfortunately, many of these decisions are made with little or no contextual information to guide the decision-makers. Consultants, analysts and product vendors have developed businesses providing advice to these decision-makers. However, such advice is often biased toward products or other services that the advisers represent.
Furthermore, the advice is usually based on only a current snapshot of the IT system of interest, without the advantage of historical data on the IT system or data about similarly configured systems in other enterprises. IT organizations are generally reluctant to make their data available to outsiders, due to privacy concerns. Thus, IT managers have no way to objectively compare their systems to similarly configured or similarly loaded IT systems in other enterprises.